ABSTRACT
It is often insufficiently recognized that, above all, Bolshevism was a cultural project. Beneath its vast institutional, social and economic aspirations was a fundamental guiding thread involving no less than a re-structuring of the human personality. The “New Soviet Person” of Stalinist times was not an aberration but a primary aim. In particular, Bolshevism was a struggle over values. In the long term the fate of the Soviet project was more the result of failure to “win over” the population to communist values, the failure to, in a more Leninist term, “raise consciousness” in key groups, than of any other factor. As a result it was eventually overwhelmed by a tide of “traditional” and “petty-bourgeois” values which continue to reign in post-Soviet Russia.
